June 2016

June 29, 2012

The Eagle Has Blanded

We're smoking way too many cigarettes. Last night we didn't eat any chocolate. We're naked as we write this. Despite the rumors, we have no intention of picking up the zither.

This cup of coffee we made ourselves (instant) is awful, awful! We dreamed we were on a commuter train full of spiders and the sky outside the train window resembled a flatulent monocle. The artwork of monsters is surprisingly sensitive.

It's been too long since we've had sex. We have condoms on hand, just in case the impossible occurs. It's like keeping a harpoon in case a whale sticks his head through the window. There's a bar down the street called The Raven Grill, it looks like just our kind of place. Small, dark, and filled with people who take their alcoholism seriously.

We love our neighborhood, it's full of frantic Hispanics cutting in and out of down on their luck laundromats, giggling children pulling faces in tow. Chicken joints galore, and a restaurant that serves remarkable papusas. A man in a red fishnet jersey with a face like a cement saw sits on the stoop outside the 7-11, angling for handouts. Two little Asian beauties work at the store downstairs, they always laugh at the things we say.

This isn't a blog post, it's a war against silence conducted by other means. Let the inner circle of failure never call it a return. Too many dark damsels, red lighter to Marlboro Silver. Benadryl. Hi Ho! Ian MacKaye lives two blocks down Irving, no doubt our neighborhood is ruined.

I'm Yea for the War on Silence. Not that there's anything wrong with a good, soothing silence of course, mumbling monks, dust sparkling in the backlight, the silent miouw of an old sleepy cat... But the loud, screaching, bullyish, terrorising silence has to be stopped with all means at hand. By chanting children's rhymes at the Evil One if need be.

Oh Man, I loved this non-post (better than Waits' In the Neighborhood) and I hope you are doing fine & finer. Yes.

Thank you Martijn and hi everybody, Frank O'Hara what did you have against Jack Kerouac or why couldn't you two get along? Insulting one another in New York bar booths in the 1950s, when the Giants were still in Brooklyn and Unremitting Failure wasn't even born yet. Play nice!

BTW Mike, read your article/revue on your hoodmate, Ian McKay.
Thought it was exceptionally well written & funny for the vivisecting that it was. Somewhere between putting John Wayne Gacey's brain inside James Lipton's skull, after soaking the brain in Margeritas overnight, and then turning him loose on Mark Wahlberg or Bronson Pinchot with sample items from Home Depot & the toppling/sandblasting of a statue of Stalin after the fall of communist Russia (if dictionary could sandblast with words). Fun!

Hi, Mike. I'm just sitting here not really watching Bones reruns. Any plans for tomorrow? I will be hanging out with my mom at my apartment and then when it gets dark, I'll go up to the roof of our building, from which we have an excellent view of the CBS Studio City fireworks. Cheap and easy, that's the way I like my fireworks.

Can I too talk about my own affairs? Perhaps it will entertain you. (Schnapps perhaps.) A hospital visit without asking how the poor chap is doing... Anyway, I fear that another great Beatnik is gone from the Lowlands, and with this I want to pay homage here in these great Halls of the Fallen Bongo Warriors.

I visit my local Charity Shop freakently [Sic. sorry] and I think I have formed a skilled eye for the underlying processes in the community. You can tell who has died and whose children have hauled all daddy's old junk to the charity shop.

When the box with second hand records is suddenly filled with Anne Murray or Cool & The Gang records, Heaven is doing a little chicken dance. These are usually met with teary-eyed gypsy reproductions and coffee mugs with 'humorous' texts. Rarely, but sometimes, a vain of Dylan runs through the record boxes (which caused me to buy 'Blonde on Blonde' for the third time), with the occasional Grateful Dead and Joan Baez disque. You can picture who has left us then and it’s sad… but with the advantage of the jackpot thrill.

Yesterday however was exceptional and completely unexpected. The record boxes looked calm and sleepy, but the CD one sparkled like a Mexican Whore (one from you, Mike!) on Father's Day! I was a puppy in the dog food store and scooped up the lot... a disappointing one from Smashing Pumpkins (‘Adore’), PF’s ‘Wish You Were Here’, 10.000 Maniacs (which can go straight back), two from Phillip Glass (which I like a lot), Serge Gainsbourg ‘Comic Strip’ (dude can’t sing, but such fine and indeed comic music), The Squirrel Nut Zippers (which I bought for the name only), two Beatles, Best of The Who, Miles & Quincy live at Montreux and Nirvana ‘In Utero’.

However… this was all a boring and long run-up to the last four CD’s. There’s Lenny Bruce’s ‘Howls, Raps & Roars’ (part 1), Alan Ginsberg ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’ and two of the four CDs of Alan Ginsberg’s ‘Holy Soul Jelly Roll’ (Vol 1 and 4). To see those in rural Holland is a true miracle. We don’t knów Bruce and Ginsberg. They are not part of our culture. I suspect perhaps .5% of Dutchmen have ever heard of them. Who has bought them and now has bought a ticket for a Window Seat Upstairs? I don’t really want to know. But perhaps this means that the world around me is not the desert I thought it was.

I suddenly wonder (in regular pessimism)… would the previous owner have bought the Ginsberg ones thinking he was buying Gainsbourg? That he was after more hot Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin panting… ? No, I don’t want to think that!

But now for something completely different... I returned to the shop to see if they got the two missing 'Holy Soul Jelly Roll' CDs (because I was hooked on the other two and need those others badly). No HSJR, but I did get away with "Prison" from Steven Jesse Bernstein. Anyone heard of the man? I didn't, but it prooved a Seatle grunge poet, semirapping over a vague band. I haven't properly listened to the words yet, but I like it already. Hi gents... miss. And remember... you're all holy, apparently.

I have the Steven Jesse Bernstein album, back when SubPop still made albums. It is great. He's great. Or was. Unfortunately he offed himself. But it is one of the greatest spoken word albums I've ever heard. maybe the best. "No No Man" is just beyond swell. The whole thing really. You got yourself a find, there, Martijn!

I believe that the music was added after the fact on PRISON. I also think he was dead before they started the project, but that they had all these recorded poems & they wanted to do something as a homage to his life & his passing. It really does kick ass, though, which is probably soemthing that cannot be said about any other spoken work album, & that especially includes that soporific macho-fop one-note schlock-hound Henry Rollins. The pie hole with feet.

Jeffers... I had counted totally on you for this! Thanks so much (for making the universe less of a void).

I played the Steven Jesse Bernstein this afternoon for a friend of mine while we drank and sat and contemplated jazz & life & shit and we had a great kick from it. It truly is great and later I will really listen the words. Indeed, according to the booklet, he recorded it without the music before he stabbed himself to death in the throat... (!).

I returned to the same shop again today and found Bob Holman's "In With The Out Crowd", another 'slam poet' it prooved, but quite tame in atmosphere. Perhaps he's great too, but the proof's in the words. Thanks!

I haven't got round to actually listening to what he says because of the way he speaks. He sort of whispers, and places his words in the open as if they're golden eggs of the last dodo. I don't like that. Perhaps he's better on paper, I don't know.

No, I don't think so. I met him in Minneapolis once when all the slam dudes parachuted into town. Nice enough guy, but I wasn't buying the schtick. It was like a sports team full of folks who were no good at sports, & they sort of transferred that competitive thing into poetry. I'd have liked to take them all out & hit them some ground balls, & see how if they could do their poetry schtick while playing baseball.

I hear you. Competition in art is a stinker. Well then... who wants to buy a Bob Holman album really cheaply? I throw a Squirrel Nut Zippers and 10,000 Maniacs album in for free. Hê hê... no, I will give him a chance.

Today, the shop had Miles Davis' 'You're Under Arrest' album. You know who 'sings' on it? Sting! My oh my... as if Yasser Arrafat has made some sketches for Hergé!

I saw a commercial for Health Insurance a few days ago. They had a baseball player, a really good baseball player, doing brain surgery.
Thats the great thing about my job.
Anyone can do it, as long as they are willing to be mediocre.

All of the Miles comeback discs after his electric freak-out period are fairly weak. I think there's one called Star People that's ok, though nothing to write home about. He did a soundtrack album for the movie Hot Spot with John Lee Hooker & Taj Mahal that was pretty cool, & is worth buying of you ever see it.